Batman #96

THE JOKER WAR, PART TWO

Years from now, the brand new Gotham City.  As he saves a kid from getting run over by Mr. Freeze's van, thanks to a Bat-Alert on the kid's own phone, Batman, riding one hundred miles per hour in his Batcycle, dressed in his brand new shining costume, stops Victor and the two kids he calls his sons, Icepop and Sno-Cone. Coming back to the Batcave, he's as always received by his beloved Alfred, telling him it was almost a record: the first exit for Batman in a month. Alfred was almost afraid that Mrs. Wayne would have to renounce to her trip to Tokyo. Bruce tells Alfred he must remember to call Barbara and ask her how Freeze got access to his old tech, and he also needs to check about the two kids Freeze called his sons, now in the hands of Leslie and Harper.  As he's about to meet with Selina, Alfred also tells him that Tim and Conner will come over for dinner, with a new proposal. Probably expensive, comments Bruce: he just paid for the new Titans Tower. As he's getting out of the Batcave then, the neck of Alfred suddenly snaps, and the butler grins: it was all an illusion, a dream. He will never change Gotham: the city now is in the hands of the Joker, and all will come to an end.  Gotham City, the present.  Bruce wakes up in distress, after a brutal nightmare. Harley Quinn welcomes him back, telling him she thought he was dead: she found him three days ago, after he almost blew up an entire Wayne Enterprises building. She also survived the cut Punchline made on her throat, and came back to help. Bruce is disoriented: what happened while he was out? Harley tells him the Joker took control of the whole city, and payed a lot of money for all the gangs in town to become part of his own organization. He gave them Jokerized versions of many of Batman's own gadgets, ordering then to pass the night killing and robbing everywhere. It's total, abrupt chaos.  To make things worse, it seems Batman is still affected from the new batch of Joker Toxin that Punchline developed. Right now, she's in Tricorner Yards and Joker just bought the Ace Chemical plant to produce the new toxin in large quantities. Meanwhile, Underbroker is keeping the city, and the GCPD, paralyzed. Batman wants to know where Joker is, but Harley does not know: she only knows that Mr. J bought all the TV space, online space and whatsoever media he could put his hands on to transmit a trailer: the Mark of Zorro, Gotham Cut. Clearly a message to Bruce Wayne about the murder of his parents. After seeing it, Bruce starts to have more hallucinations, and Harley fails to inject a tranquilizer on him. As the Dark Knight goes away, Harley swears that he must get his @#$$ together, or they are all going to die.  Bruce is hearing also a voice in his head: Alfred. He knows he's not real, but he must focus on other things now, so he must live through with it. Also, in the Narrows, a strange kid who goes by the name of Clownhunter decided to whack some clowns on the head, splitting their skull. A new, bizarre and homicidal vigilante is born.  Bruce goes to the Theater, as he knows the Joker set up something for him there. As he arrives, he is shocked by the fact the Theater looks exactly like his former self, when he was a child. When he came to see Zorro, then to see his parents die. Maybe it is the work of the Toxin, but Batman doubts it: Joker probably used some money to make it an exact copy of that day. As he enters the room, an awful stench of rotten corpses hits Bruce's nose: soon the Joker reveals him that the people watching the show are all the corpses of his Gotham victims. Every single one. He made his clown dig and he used the Designer's tech to revive them into mind-controlled zombies. They will become an horde of Joe Chills, ready to make some new tragedies in Gotham City. And Batman won't be able to stop them.